Robbie Whelan
speaker
85 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2020
last heard Sep 2020
Robbie Whelan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And it's always been opposed by the private insurance industry because the private insurance industry, of course, does a great business providing gap insurance to cover exactly these costs.
One of the reasons why we wanted to do this story in the first place was because there were a lot of reports coming out about the sticker shock of COVID-19 treatment.
So someone would come home from the hospital with a bill for $100,000, $200,000, $400,000, $500,000 worth of treatment from long hospital stays, ICU visits, ventilators,
All kinds of very expensive medical treatments.
They do cost quite a bit to the providers.
But we really wanted to go beyond that sticker shock and sort of look at what actually the patients are being expected to pay out of pocket.
And when you look at that, when you drill down, it's not nearly as much.
It's almost no one who pays the full cost of a long-term care regimen for COVID-19.
However, that doesn't mean that these bills that people are getting for out-of-pocket costs are insignificant.
They're far from it.
I mean, for a lot of families, they're very painful.
And for example, we highlighted one family in our story from upstate New York who is a Medicare beneficiary who had most of her treatment covered, but also had almost $5,000 in out-of-pocket costs, purely for medicine.
She didn't have Medicare Part D, which covers prescription drugs, and she therefore had to pay
a couple thousand dollars in medications.
And this is a family that lived fairly comfortably before, $85,000 a year annual income from two working parents and two kids.
But when the pandemic hit, both of them stopped working.
The father lost his job.
The mother was unwell, unable to work.
And for a family like that, when you see your income fall in half, $5,000 is not an easy thing to come up with.
I mean, they've had to change their lifestyle.
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